The emergence of information technology (IT) cloud environments, with their resource virtualization, dynamic allocation, image technology, brings with it a shift from the traditional static IT environment management towards management as a service for dynamic IT environments.
However, challenges arise when trying to manage across IT cloud environments. For example, a challenge exists in providing real-time awareness of the dynamic IT environment changes given the IT cloud promise for scalability, flexibility and seamless provisioning. Also, a challenge exists in providing an end-to-end unified management across different domains from private to public and from local to remote, while being efficient and cost effective.
Existing approaches for IT management include management via agents that cover a limited range of products, agent-less solution management which leverages native management application programming interfaces (APIs) as they are available for products when directly accessible, and remote management that uses remote access and data collection techniques for static IT environments.
The existing approaches, however, include a number of shortcomings when trying to leverage the approaches across domains and in IT cloud environments. For example, existing approaches monitor only a limited range of products, require local connectivity, cannot deal with dynamic IT environments or cross domains, and cannot build an end-to-end (e2e) global view from partial monitoring results.